Parafango

Magnetic performances by Karole Armitage, Michael Clark and Philippe Découflé are the focus of this French production, an intricate and quintessential Atlas pastiche of provocative dance, new music, pop design and costuming, narrative, documentary, and media references. Armitage's eclectic, often frenetic choreography is performed with a postured insouciance. The kinetically shot and edited dance segments are intercut with an ambiguous narrative involving the performers, TV news footage and other appropriated images, color bars and other formal video devices. Atlas punctuates the physicality of the dance with an artificial media reality. By rupturing the performance illusion with deconstructive devices, Atlas subjects this radically postmodern dance to an inquiry into the tension between the fictive and the real.